Re: VMs: Re: word length counts

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jeff,

At 17:23 05/07/2003 +0100, Jeff wrote:
> The statistics gathered here are the way to unlock the phrase structure and
> the reason for the unique nature of a high percentage of words. It suggests
> a catalogue of items, or a recipe.

Recipes tend to have common ingredients: lists tend to have related items. 
Neither really matches what we see in the VMS satisfactorily alone - to my 
eyes, the high number of unique words (dain/daiin/daiiin aside, which I 
believe may well be derived from an apothecary shorthand) point to the 
existence of some kind of non-obvious cryptography "under the hood" of the VMS.

Any satisfactory explanation for the VMS would need to accommodate its 
letter-to-letter structuring (real or false?), its apparent word structure 
(real or false?), and its multitude of other statistical features. If it 
also explains things like the "long gallows", multi-eyed gallows, Philip 
Neal's gallows-delimited apparently key-like sequences (often on the first 
line of a page), etc, etc... then so much the better. Phrase structure is 
only one feature of many to be explained.

However, I'd say the biggest problem with looking for phrase structure is 
that if (full) spaces are fake, there wouldn't be anything to find but 
noise. But that hasn't stopped anyone looking for them all the same. :-)

Perhaps the worst-case scenario for spaces is that space acts as a trigger 
to change code-books / cycle codes. I don't think that's the case here, 
but... you never know. :-o

> Is there anything that could be interpreted as a map. It may not look like a
> map as we see it.

Here's a link to some scans of the "9-rosette" page: note that I scanned 
these from the reproduction in Kraus' Catalogue 100, so there are some 
half-toning artefacts visible at high magnification (the original has even 
finer resolution):-
        http://www.voynich.info/phpwiki/

But whether it's a map or not (I think it is, and that it represents the 
powerful states in Northern Italy circa 1460) is an open question. :-o

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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